Keeper of the Affirming Flame

By

Brad Leithauser

Updated March 5, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

The English poet W.H. Auden arrived in New York in January 1939. He was 32 and internationally famous. America was all but unknown to him, yet he took to it eagerly and steadfastly, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1946. Though he would always travel widely, New York remained his base until shortly before his death, in 1973. America had a transforming influence on Auden's poetry, and he—in his role as teacher, essayist and leader of an informal, brilliant, drifting, often boozy literary salon—had a transforming effect on American poetry. The interlocking ways in which a vast country shaped an individual poet, even as he shaped its contentious, loosely confederated poets, is the subject of Aidan Wasley's "The Age of Auden."

ENLARGE

Auden in 1956, photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt.
Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

At the time of his New York arrival, Auden was widely seen—and widely resented for being seen—as the heir apparent to T.S. Eliot. Auden was going to extend the Modernist revolution. It turned out that Eliot's clipped, apocalyptic dispatches from the Waste Land, his haunting ruminations from the end of the world, hardly marked the end of poetry. Suddenly, Auden had emerged, with all his robust erudition, his unimpeachable command of poetic forms, his eclectic subject matter, his disarming willingness to risk silliness in pursuit of drollery. And he was prolific. He embodied a notion that modern poetry not only could move forward but could do so on many fronts simultaneously.

No other English poet offers us inspiration in quite the fashion Auden does. From the onset of his career he seemed to make the whole corpus of English verse his own, wandering from century to century, from poetic school to poetic school, finding wherever he looked something he could profitably borrow: a form long fallen into neglect, an archaic but still vibrant meter, an outdated vocabulary waiting to be reborn.

Of course, this comprehensiveness meant an awesome amount of work, and yet Auden's labors typically wound up serving an indomitable playfulness. His pleasure, his self-delight were infectious. Even in the poems written in the last, ailing years of his life, you sense a schoolboy's impish hunger for plunder: Auden was forever on the lookout for another unviolated orchard from which he could pilfer a couple of apples, a glowing orange.

Auden's productivity and out-flung array of styles complicate Mr. Wasley's chosen task of tracking influences—and render it all the more gratifying when he unfolds some unexpected linkage. He is surely right when pointing out that no other poet of our time has assembled so disparate a circle of admirers. Auden's followers range from James Merrill to Allen Ginsberg, Anthony Hecht to Adrienne Rich, Robert Hayden to Maxine Kumin, Joseph Brodsky to John Ashbery.

Mr. Wasley sums this up adroitly, noting "how many of the critical narratives of postwar American poetry" frame the period "in terms of competing camps of formalism versus experiment, establishment versus avant-garde, feminist or gay versus masculinist, West Coast versus East." Auden, he observes, cut "across all these regional, cultural, stylistic, and gender divides." In other places, Mr. Wasley's prose is less satisfying. I shuddered a little on encountering the phrase "complex polyvocal, transhistorical schematic." Still, given the opacity of much academic writing, Mr. Wasley's is comparatively free of jargon.

A greater obstacle is the presence of so much redundancy in so brief a study. Some of this arises on the level of phrase and sentence ("share a surprising amount in common," "its cyclicality, its repetitiveness"). But most of the duplication takes place on a broader scale. Whether quoting Auden or some other poet, Mr. Wasley makes a habit of seeking to clarify the already clear; he paraphrases the pellucid. Here is Adrienne Rich in a poem about her bookish father: "she who / must overthrow the father, take what he taught her / and use it against him." And here is Mr. Wasley a paragraph later: "She 'takes what he taught her' . . . to 'use against him' and the male literary tradition he represents."

The Age of Auden

By Aidan Wasley Princeton, 258 pages, $35

In one of Auden's most quoted poems, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," he famously remarked that "poetry makes nothing happen." I often wish he'd never said it. Auden's sweeping declaration is actually part of a more ambivalent utterance, in which he seemingly contradicts himself a few lines down, where poetry becomes "a way of happening." But in most discussions of the poem this tension is ignored and only poetry's alleged social impotence remains. Auden's declaration has stirred up any number of protests, often couched in poems in which, unfortunately, nothing but indignation happens. For his part, Mr. Wasley can't seem to let go of the two phrases, "makes nothing happen" and "a way of happening." Irrepressibly popping up every couple of pages, they create a distracting competition: Which will ultimately dominate?

Mr. Wasley takes a dim view of Auden's final years. The once innovative poet was left behind; he receded into "cultural conservatism and contented domesticity." He became a "figure of sad diminishment." This is a plausible view—probably a majority view. But a notable minority feels otherwise. Two of the poets Mr. Wasley embraces, James Merrill and Anthony Hecht, saw the old master further extending himself in his final decade, discovering a new music— a strain of poetry that blended heartbreak with aplomb. The poem "A Lullaby," in which Auden wittily sings himself to sleep ("Let your last thoughts all be thanks"), is a haunting example.

Though Auden's influence is powerful and broad, "The Age of Auden" helpfully delineates its borders. The battle of literary reputations takes place in a dusty arena, and W. H. Auden will surely be one of those titanic figures that loom through whatever dim clouds arise. He will remain unignorable.

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